As mentioned in the chapter introduction, page types also have human readable handles, which offer a convenient way of loading page types without knowing their numerical IDs. Handles are always alphanumerical strings with underscores between words, and do not contain any file extensions such as .php
. For example, the handle for a page type called "Left Sidebar" would most likely be left_sidebar
, but concrete5 lets users specify any alphanumeric string for a handle, so it's possible that the handle for Left Sidebar would also just be left
.
You can find the handles of page types by visiting the Page Types area of the concrete5 dashboard, located at /dashboard/pages/types/
on your concrete5 website.
In this recipe, we will be loading a page type with the handle of left_sidebar
. Please make sure that page type exists in your concrete5 installation, otherwise you can add a new page type with that handle, or adapt the recipe to work for your situation.
Here's how we would load the page type with a handle of left_sidebar
. This is similar to loading a page by its path. The steps are as follows:
Open
/config/site_post.php
in your preferred code editor.Declare the handle of the page type that you wish to load.
$handle = 'left_sidebar';
Load the page type using the handle that we just defined.
$pageType = CollectionType::getByHandle($handle);
You can verify that you have loaded the page type by dumping the
$pageType
variable.my_debug($pageType);
A simple database query is performed, which will return a CollectionType
object if it is successful.
Just like the warning for loading pages by their paths, you will want to exercise the same good judgment when loading page types by their handles. Since these handles are just strings that can be edited through the concrete5 interface, you will need to make sure that you aren't writing code that could break if one of the site editors changes the handle of a page type.